Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In typical cellular wireless communication systems, wireless communication devices (e.g., cell phones, personal digital assistants, laptops, netbooks, tablets, and/or other wirelessly equipped devices, any of which may be referred to as a user equipment device (UE) for brevity) subscribe to service from a given cellular wireless service provider. In practice, a service provider will operate one or more networks (sometimes referred to as radio access networks (RANs)) including base stations that radiate to define one or more wireless coverage areas, referred to as sectors, where the subscriber UEs can operate.
Generally, wireless communications between a given UE and a serving base station in a RAN are carried out in accordance with one or more air interface protocols such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA (e.g., Long Term Evolution (LTE) or Wireless Operability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) (e.g., 1×RTT and 1×EV-DO), GSM, GPRS, UMTS, EDGE, iDEN, TDMA, AMPS, MMDS, WIFI, and BLUETOOTH, or others now known or later developed. Through each base station (and corresponding RAN), a UE can obtain connectivity to other networks such as the public switched telephone network (PTSN) and the Internet. In addition to base stations, each RAN may include one or more switches or gateways that provide connectivity with one or more packet-switched networks. Conveniently with this arrangement, a UE that is positioned within coverage of the RAN may communicate with a base station and in turn, via the base station, with other served devices, or with other entities on the packet-switched network.